James Bond's Creator, a Dead Man and the Lie That Fooled Hitler #history #ww2 #operationmincemeat

In May 1943, Adolf Hitler moved his armies because of a letter found on a dead British officer who had washed up in Spain. The officer had never existed.

The Allies were about to invade Sicily, and everyone knew it. So two British intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley, took an idea from a 1939 memo linked to Ian Fleming, the future creator of James Bond: dress a dead body as an officer, give him fake secret plans, and let the enemy find him. This is the full true story of Operation Mincemeat: the homeless Welshman who became "Major William Martin", the fiancée who never existed, the eyelash hidden in a letter, the submarine off Huelva, the briefcase the Spanish almost refused to open, and the 1st Panzer Division sent to Greece while the Allies landed in Sicily.

Chapters:
0:00 A dead man fools Hitler
1:02 The problem: everyone knew it was Sicily
1:40 Ian Fleming and the Trout memo
2:24 Why Spain?
3:02 Where do you get a body?
3:54 Three months to build a man
4:33 Pam, the fiancée who never existed
5:10 The fake secret letter
5:54 Churchill: "Give it another swim"
6:15 Frozen feet and dry ice
6:49 HMS Seraph
7:24 Washed ashore in Huelva
7:56 The twist: the briefcase stays shut
8:58 "Swallowed rod, line and sinker"
9:13 Hitler moves his armies
9:42 Sicily, July 1943
10:32 Who was the man who never was?

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Martin_(Royal_Marines_officer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trout_memo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewen_Montagu
Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat (2010); Ewen Montagu, The Man Who Never Was (1953).

Archive photos and film (Wikimedia Commons):
Public domain: "Major Martin" naval identity card; Charles Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu (St John Horsfall); Ewen Montagu in 1943; "Pam" (UK National Archives WO 106/5921); Ian Fleming c. 1958 (Erich Hartmann); Admiral John Godfrey, HMS Seraph and her crew, Sicily landings (Imperial War Museum / Royal Navy official photographers); Sir Harold Alexander and Lord Louis Mountbatten (British official photographers); Winston Churchill (IWM HU 55521); Wilhelm Canaris; Mussolini and Hitler (Museum of the Revolution of the Peoples of Yugoslavia); "The Invaders of Sicily" (U.S. National Archives, 18-CS-426).
Adolf Hitler: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H1216-0500-002 / Heinrich Hoffmann, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.
Karl Dönitz: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1976-127-06A, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.
Erwin Rommel: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J16362 / Winkelmann, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.
Panzer IV in Italy: Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-305-0652-14 / Funke, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.
Ronnie Reed in 1945: the Reed family collection, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Bletchley Park Mansion: DeFacto, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Dry ice: Richard Wheeler (Zephyris), CC BY-SA 3.0.
Glyndwr Michael memorial plaque, Aberbargoed: Jaggery, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Grave of William Martin in Huelva: smasheng, GFDL; "Lapida de William Martin": Javiergarcea, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Huelva beach ("Espigón Huelva"): Juan José Rodríguez Macías, public domain.
Maps: made by The Improbably True with Natural Earth data. Documents, letters and the canister in the video are recreations.
Music: "Spy Glass", "Long Note Four" and "Heartbreaking" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Sound effects: ElevenLabs.

#history #ww2 #operationmincemeat